The beast that we Nigerians must tame

It the height of the Western Region crisis of 1962-6, the crisis that led to the collapse of Nigeria’s First Republic and the coming of Nigeria’s first military coup (of January 1966), a prominent Lagos lawyer, Femi Okunu, made a statement that became famous. He said, “The power of the federal government has grown, is growing, and ought to be curbed”.

Femi Okunu was speaking in an era when the powers of the federal government were still comparatively small and well-defined, and when our regional authorities were still the makers and movers of development and progress in our country.

Today, what we still call our federal government does not operate as a member government in a federation; it rules all and dictates to all. We no longer have a federation; what we have is a chaotic jumble of ruins in which, and through which, a so-called federal government stampedes and rumbles at will.

And herein lies the root of our country’s growing poverty and hopelessness. Herein lies the ever escalating unemployment among our youths, the constant flight of our educated youths to other lands, the growing spectre of violent conflicts all over our country, the descent of some of our youths into aberrations such as Boko Haram and secret cults. It is the root of that horrendous iniquity whereby we let the Delta lands that produce all our petroleum wealth become the poorest and most neglected part of our country.

As natural resources go, our country is one of the richest places in the world. And as soon as our own leading citizens were given the duty, from about 1952, to manage most of our county’s affairs, we commendably began to strive to fulfil our country’s promise. In the context of our federation of three regions, we engaged in a lively rivalry for greater and greater socio-economic developments, and for constantly measurable improvements in the quality of the lives of our people. Our start-off resources for participation in the world economy were humble, consisting mostly of exports of a few crops – cocoa from the Western Region, palm produce from the Eastern, and groundnuts from the Northern. But we made the best of what we had. Each region developed better and better programmes for supporting and encouraging the producers of its export crop, thereby helping those producers to earn more income and Nigeria to earn more foreign exchange. Each region went on from this base to advance in its own chosen direction – free primary education in the West, ambitious industrialization efforts in the West and the East and, to a lesser extent, also in the North, and impressive infrastructural programs everywhere.

Oh, sure, there was partisan politics. That’s the nature of modern democratic countries. But “development” was the big game in our country, and the regions were where most of the big game was played. Each region commanded adequate freedom and resources to be able to play its own share of the game, and to be able to make its own kind of contributions to the overall growing prosperity of our country. That is how a federation is supposed to be.

But, then, in 1962, the federal government took the insane step of trying to establish federal control over one of our regions – the Western Region. That step unleashed a cataclysmic progression of events which ultimately brought our military into the management of our country’s affairs. Trained for, and used only to, central command, the military turned our country into a centrally commanded country.

Run-away corruption became a close companion of over-centralized governing. In the hands of our military rulers, the growing volume of petroleum revenue only bred an almost sub-human species of greed, accompanied by a desire to control more and more. The regional and local passions and energies that had pushed our country steadily forward were destroyed. Focusing all attention on petroleum, our federal controllers abandoned the nurturing of the other assets that had been building our country’s economy.

Denied the old regional help and encouragement, our cash crop farmers lost morale and hope. The federal authorities made the situation worse by establishing federal “regulation” (that is, control) over the cash crops. By 1965, Nigeria was still one of the largest exporters of groundnuts, palm produce and cocoa in the world. By 1980, Nigeria had ceased to be a serious exporter of any, and our farmers who had been luxuriating on the income from those exports became pauperized. Their growing poverty rapidly spread to the general fabric of our society. Economists say that tropical Africa’s earnings from exports fell dramatically during the 1970s, losing about $70 billion per annum, and that much of those losses were Nigeria’s. The peoples of the former Northern Region suffered the most, because, unfortunately, serious droughts ravaged the distant North in these years, blasting farming and cattle rearing – at a time when our federal controllers just didn’t have any attention to give to anything other than the petroleum from which they were stealing large personal fortunes.

Concerning the “regulation” of our cash crops by the federal government, I heard a frightening story in 1989 from the Managing Director of a Nigerian private company in his office in Isolo, Lagos. The said company was doing a growing export business in gum-Arabic from the North – but suddenly the federal government ordered them to surrender the export business to federal government agencies. And within a year, Nigeria disappeared as an exporter of gum-Arabic.

Someday, hopefully, some bright young historian will delve into these matters and tell the world the story of how the Nigerian federal government, in its mad zeal to control everything, destroyed all regional and local development energies, turned Nigeria into a poor country, attracted most enterprising Nigerians away from truly productive enterprises into a life of hustling and sharing of public money, and turned a land of bright hope into a land of utter hopelessness.

Look in any direction, and you will see the destructive effects of federal seizure and control everywhere – in the brutalizing of the intellectual excellence of our topmost universities and the drastic weakening of our educational system in general. You will see it in the virtual elimination of our local governments as crucial factors in our regional development efforts, in the collapse of some aspects of our infrastructures (like roads and highways) and our pathetic failure to make sense of other aspects (like electricity). You will see it in the actual deliberate federal obstruction of the efforts of some state governments to do good things for their states, and in the political instability resulting from the use of federal power to manipulate state elections and to impose favoured persons on our states. You will see it in the destruction of the integrity of our higher courts.

To return our country to the path of sanity and progress, we Nigerians must join hands, peacefully reorder our country, curb the monster that is wrecking our country, and free our energies to go back to constructive work. That is the only path of hope for our country. Whoever thinks that Nigeria can exist for much longer than now under the present chaos of federal control is seriously mistaking. If Nigeria breaks up soon, as many informed people are predicting, then it will be because we let the federal government continue to be the unruly dictator and master of all.